Budget Management

One of the main reasons for moving financial applications to the cloud is the advantage of not requiring a large upfront investment in software and equipment. Moving to the cloud enables better control over spending, since the amount is determined in advance for a long period and provides the ability to implement quickly and leverage the system’s advanced capabilities.

Relying on spreadsheets in budget planning processes involves unnecessary risk (about 75% of finance managers rely on spreadsheets in managing their budget). Planning solutions can ease these challenges, but they still remain beyond the financial reach of many organizations that do not have adequate computing resources or budgets that justify the investment.

Cloud-based solutions, such as CloudERP, provide opportunities for organizations of all sizes to streamline planning and forecasting processes, shorten implementation time, and reduce costs.

While spreadsheets are easy to use among finance professionals, when they are used as a central system for data management, updated by many people and many units, as required in budget planning processes, a number of problems arise:

Tracking and understanding changes

Collecting and synchronizing information from many files

Difficulty in making organization-wide changes that need to be carried out across many sheets

Difficulties in synchronizing sheets maintained on different computers

The amount of time it takes from the moment a data point is updated in someone’s file until the update affects and appears for everyone

Risk of information loss from files stored on laptops that move outside the organization

Difficulty in managing highly detailed information and complex computational models requiring processing capabilities and handling large volumes of data

Difficulty in dealing with updates to many file versions

Dealing with these difficulties every month leads finance professionals to understand that this is not the optimal tool for such uses.

Moving to the Cloud

Cloud technology makes the transition from spreadsheets easier

While a few years ago finance professionals were hesitant about adopting cloud applications, advances in information security and confidentiality changed the situation. CRM applications were the first to make the move to the cloud, and in fact they contain information with significant sensitivity for the organization (customer names, hot lead data and sales opportunities, product prices), even more so than budget data. Cloud technology has advanced and matured, and today more and more finance professionals are willing to move financial applications to the cloud.

In conversations with finance managers, they cite as one of the significant reasons in favor of moving financial applications to the cloud the advantage of not making a large upfront investment in software and equipment, savings and better control over spending, since its amount is determined and known in advance for a long period, and of course, the advantage stemming from the ability to implement quickly and leverage the system’s advanced capabilities.

The fact that conservative, risk-averse finance managers now agree to move the financial systems that are critical to them to the cloud should signal to all companies that cloud services are rapidly becoming the IT strategy of finance managers who want to implement the most advanced solutions quickly and at low cost, in order to support their business goals.